Joe Biden Should Know Better: Don’t Ever Touch Other People at Work

Imagine you work in the HR department, and in your company is one Joseph Biden. Joe, everybody calls him. Joe! Been at the company forever. Smart. You can talk to him about anything. Cranked off two doubles at the softball game Wednesday night. Good in a room.

Great guy.

Only issue is, he walks up behind female coworkers and women who visit the office, and, there’s really no other way to put this… He nuzzles them.

Nuzzles?

Yeah, nuzzles. And then sometimes kisses them and, every now and then, puts both his hands on their sides, sort of holding them in place. And then he places his chin on their shoulders and whispers things that only the women can hear. He does it a little with men, sure. And the occasional child. But he seems to be more… affectionate with women. More handsy. More grabby. He touches them more.

So what do you say to Joe? Surely you say something, right? This behavior is a real liability. People have lost their jobs for less. Companies have paid out millions in damages for less.

What do you say to Joe?

You tell him to stop touching people. You’ve told other people the same thing. Why would it be any different with this guy?

Those videos of the real Joe Biden putting his hands on women in the White House or in some other political setting? The stories recounted by Nevada Assemblywoman Lucy Flores and Connecticut nonprofit worker Amy Lappos? This all happened while he was at work. He was the vice president, but the vice presidency is a job. Was he simply providing support to Stephanie Carter when, during a workday in February of 2015, he put his hands on her shoulders when her husband Ashton was being named Secretary of Defense by President Obama and whispered in her ear? She says he was—and that as her friend he had every right to.

But he was at work.

You don’t need to touch people at work—employees, peers, counterparts, acquaintances—to share an important moment with them. Touching doesn’t accentuate poignancy any more than a few well-chosen words do. Sure, this sort of thing went unnoticed in the 70s, 80s, and even 90s, or pretty much any time before 2016, but part of life for men in 2019 is the constant relearning we’re doing right now about the effect our actions—seemingly innocuous or all in good fun—have on women. It’s not enough to say: Oh, that’s just who he is. He’s old! He didn’t mean anything! The message has been delivered and it keeps getting reiterated.

Whoopi Goldberg said on The View yesterday, “Joe is a hands-on kind of guy. She says she felt violated, and I have to take her at her word, but it would have been nice if she had turned to him and said… ‘Mr. Vice President, I’m not really comfortable with that… Because he’s standing right there.”